Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Conceit, Charity and Common Sense

How much does a political view impinge
on the ability of the individual or the group to exercise common sense? How important
are ethics? A friend recently pointed out, based on my writings he believes
that I possess a persecution complex but he added that this was not necessarily
a bad thing. Does this affect my ability
to exercise common sense or to judge current affairs? Of course it does. Is it
justified?

Does it matter if the cup is half empty or half full? First, there are two questions we need
to ask. What is the nature of the
liquid in the cup? And is there any benefit in filling the cup? We may strive
to fill the cup, unless of course it is filled with a toxic liquid, in which
case our misguided enthusiasm may not be so eloquent an act of dedication to
doing what is right as opposed to what is correct. The former is based on long term ethical
considerations while the latter is based on fashionable moral, and therefore time
specific practices.

A recent article in the American
journal ‘Foreign Policy’ (“Please Don’t Send Food” page 26, July/August 2012)
underlined this point when it questioned our blind enthusiasm for charity. A joint study from Harvard and Yale Universities
suggests that food aid doesn’t work. In fact it can prolong violent
conflict. By examining developing
countries between 1972 and 2006 what the researchers revealed was that for
every 10% increase in the amount of food aid delivered the likelihood of
violent conflict increases by 1.4% - the pursuit of power over-rides any desire
for good. Too often, charities and their do-gooders are as guilty of this
arrogance as the gunmen that exploit them.

Maimonides (a Jewish philosopher
of the 12th century whose adaptation of Aristotelianthought
to Biblical faith had a significant influence both on Christianity and Judaism)
categorised giving into 8 levels of benevolence – The eighth (least worthy)
level was giving unwillingly while the first (final) level enabled the
recipient to achieve independence from further assistance.

Of course it doesn’t mean that we
can’t try to make the world a better place but in order to do that, we should
first define what kind of a world we want and yes, that does mean defining the
values we think are important. Letting a
thousand ideas bloom is fine as long as they do not include ‘values’ such as
child marriage, female circumcision, consuming albino livers, hanging
homosexuals and stoning rape victims.
Unless we know what is important to us we cannot complain that our
rights have been usurped while we are too busy concerning ourselves with other
activities.

During the rule of Marshall Tito (Dictator
of Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1980) the ethnic rivalry and historical malevolence
between the nations making up the federal republic was kept in check by strict
suppression of any nationalist sentiment amongst the 8 federal units. Up to
750,000 Serbs along with Jews and Romany victims were murdered by Croatian nationalists
during World War 2. They were occasionally
assisted by Bosnian (Muslim) SS units. Given
the history of the post-Tito democratic era, Marshal Tito’s dictatorship was
not worse than the consequent history of the region. Unless we are willing to
understand and internalise the fears of the protagonists (and we can only do this
by learning of the history and the mythology of nations) only then will we
learn from history and not repeat its mistakes.

Unless we willingly do this we
have learnt nothing from human conflict and are doomed to repeat the past in an
endless cycle of despair broken only by brief periods of triumph. Too often we
dismiss history and willingly accept the teachings of a myopic education system
which spoon feeds us the prejudice of cultural and moral relativism. In our
post-Modern fear of conflict we refuse to take a stand based on principles that
have shaped Western society. By bowing to the prejudices of others and by
accepting their interpretation of our history we become no better than the
rapists and murderers that we refuse to condemn. Politics too often binds us to simplistic
solutions that do little to address the complicated issues they usually subvert.

It seems that ethics really do
have very little if anything to do with politics of either Left or Right.

The Left, at least in theory,
dismisses the individual for the good of the group; ignoring the fact that the
group is built on the collective will of the individuals within the group. The
Right pays lip service to family values and ignores the collective, while
parroting the limited theory that it aims to raise the individual to
achievements that further the group. In both cases the individual is rarely
seen as a person but as a theoretical unit, a number governed by laws to which
they have no input. In practice the Left cannot relate to the individual as
having rights outside of the group while the Right has had to invent the idea
of ethical conservatism to accommodate those people that actually care for anyone
outside of their own circle.

Left and Right care only for what
the powerful can extract from the weak; cynically, they see relevance only in
the demographics of the increasingly alienated electorate.

The failure of capitalism based democracy
and democratic socialism is that both are based on the economics of the
amphitheatre. Just as ancient Rome kept its population in check with ever
increasingly expensive spectacles of gladiatorial tournaments involving
condemned prisoners, slaves and ever more exotic animals so today we keep the
people entertained with cheap loans by which they can keep themselves
entertained, an improvement of sorts on ancient Rome. But the result for the
nation state is the same. We have bankrupted
our future because the politics of power is about the present and not the
future. Our collective failure to make
painful decisions that share the load fairly across all of society is why we traditionally
fall prey to demagogues and dictators. It is why War is the populist solution
too often applied when governments fail to equitably rebalance society.

As a society we take pride in the
advances we have made in science and technology but we remain discouraged from
independent thought, our ability to analyse the multi-directional information
inputs we receive are still restricted by most of the former prejudices and
pressures our ancestors experienced.

So to answer the original
questions I asked, common sense is not a natural state and Ethics generally falls
prey to political expediency. The sycophancy of global cultural simplification
guarantees that if we are all brothers and sisters then the embarrassing
differences that define us must be tolerated even though they directly
contradict our most cherished values.